Farther Down the Fractal

Well, so far as I can tell, I’m not an arahat. And if I am, it’s an exceptionally subtle condition of being, which it may well be.

Not that I’m complaining mind you, as all aspects of my practice have made quantum leaps in clarity and precision.

One secret that I’ve learned to build my life around is this: quantifiable goals + measurable progress + time = guaranteed success. All you have to do is not give up, or die, and success is inevitable.

One might think of this excercise as something in line with ’shooting the curve’. Where one isn’t really aiming for goals, but to change the rate of change in the system. By that standard, I’m now much farther ahead on the timeline than I was a month ago. If I were to plug another month like this into the system, who knows what might be accomplished, and I may well do just that.

For now though, the full spectrum catastophe is ramping up everywhere you look, and it’s time to get back down to color commentary on the kali yuga.

Which means we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming, for awhile at least.

Expect a more detailed list of goals, progress reports and itinerary of upcoming items is short order…

Balancing the Equation

With about ten days to go, it remains to be seen whether or not I will fullfill the goal of becoming an arahat. And while it may seem on the face of it a wildly unattainable goal, especially given the level of effort I’m able to actually give this practice, I must say the results have been fairly impressive.

It seems I can usually give three days a week to intense jhanna practice, and on those days, do between 6-8 solid hours of practice, with maybe three more middling hours. I feel I now know more about this practice than ever before, in many ways. It’s much easier to hold stronger concentration states for long periods of time, and I can make distinctions in the various jhanna factors that I was never able to do previously.

I also now understand the difference between what are called ‘hard’ or ’soft’ jhanna states, where the latter is more of mental taste, the former is like swimming in it, or being embedded in a solid block of a certain kind of vibrational quality. This obviously makes practice much more rewarding and powerfull. I had a very compelling glimpse into a strong version of the 5th jhanna, or the 1st formless jhanna, sometime known as the base of infinite space. So that aspect of the plan is on track.

The insight side remains my strong hand, however. Last week I had two experiences that together or seperately could be considered powerfull fruitions. The lasting increased sense of peace and dramatically improved level of concentration ability leads me to think at least one of them was. Certain aspects of reality seem much more obvious and non-conceptual in a way that is very hard and sort of annoying to explain.

” Isn’t that what you said before?”

” yeah, but I GET it this time!”

Sigh…

Which leaves the conduct or morality side of the equation. It can be slippery to see where your thoughts and speech and actions aren’t carrying the weight of your realisations, but there is a certain kind of unpleasant schizophrenia that points you in the right direction. After the latest apparent fruitions, I became acutely aware of poorly chosen words to other people, my seeming inability to say the right things, or at least, keep my yap shut.

So I think I’ll just focus on not swearing or talking behind peoples backs for now, which feels like a pretty good idea, and I probably ought to have been doing all along anyway.

The most rewarding thing in my life, and the thing I think this website speaks to the most, is the pleasure and fulfillment of endless self-discovery. There are few things in this world that are endless, but to always be able to learn and explore your own creative potential is one of them.

So, if it transpires that I have to continue this project beyond the deadline, I shant be too disappointed about it.

Permanent Revolution!

Exactly

With a certain amount of reluctance, I must concede that my new favorite website is steve pavlina dot-com.

I will grant that there is a certain saccharine edge to his stuff that is slightly unpalatable to me, but I will chalk that up to a slightly different demographic, and a higher quotient of punk rock in mydna. In any event, I find him extremely useful and I am essentially in agreement with most everything he says.

When it comes down to something like resolving to become an arahat in 30 days, it helps to be able to hunker down with a powerfully goal oriented motivational-type guy. The article of his I’ve been reading lately and the one relevant to our current discussion, concerns his technique of time management and spelling out exactly what you want in exquisite detail.

Hence, I will spell out exactly what I mean by becoming an arahat and make it clear how that’s going to happen.

In my 3 part augoeides finale, I made it clear my understanding of enlightenment, and the buddhist path in general, was composed of three synergised parts:

-Morality training; which is more or less what we occultist, reality hacker, counter culture types would call metaprogramming, in the RAW, john lilly tradition. It consists of changing how you talk, think and act.

-Concentration training; which is reducing the fragmentary tendancies of the mind and developing the ability to manipulate mental energy.

and

-Insight training; which is developing understanding of basic sensate reality and rooting out pockets of delusional interpretation.

Now, enlightenment, in the most rudimentary sense, can be thought of as cultivating fundamental insight to the utmost and using the other two as supporting structures. This seems to be a popular view, at least among those who will even talk about being able to actually ‘be’ enlightened at all, which are not very numerous. I can say with a certain amount of conviction that I’ve done that. But I have come to be convinced that implicit in the teachings of the buddha, is the assumption that a fully realised arahat has mastered all of these in a synergized way.

Thus, my precise goals for the rest of this month ( now 20 days ) are three fold…

1. My gold standard for morality training is eliminating all fear and anxiety. This would be the peak of metaprogramming skill for me. I imagine others would differ, based on their personality, but for me, fearlessness is the cornerstone. Everything else would be an afterthought.

2. Concentration wise, the gold standard is easy. This is the 8th samatha jhanna. Also known as the base of neither perception nor non-perception. I will settle for being to sustain this, seated, for a hour. I could make it even harder and go for something called nirhodha sammadhi , which is quite possibly the hardest meditative achievement going, but no one I know of says you can do that predictably in a month.

3. Lastly, the gold standard for insight is pretty straight up: eradication of fundamental ignorance and perfect knowledge, moment to moment, of the three characteristics of suffering, not-self, and impermanence.

There is a certain power in recognising something as being nearly impossible, accepting the magnitude of all it’s difficulties, and choosing to do it anyway. In many ways, anything else is not really a choice at all. Only exploring the world in the bucket.

Throw aside your buckets!

under the tree

wanted to write something today, even if it’s not too scintiliating.

First I was kind of sick, then I was just busy, now I feel like I have too many ideas in my head to act on succinctly.

When I got to the end of the by-now-notorious debacle that was the augoeides project, I felt like one of the conclusions I had drawn was the need to take stock of my body of work here, and try to integrate the understandings that came out of it.

It may seem odd, but a lot of the things that come out here pass my lips or my keyboard without really registering in conscious mind. I spend a fair bit of time going over this stuff and wondering where the fuck it came from ( as I’m sure many of you do as well ) I sometimes feel as if this site is put together by my alter ego.

I eventually realised that this site was my ‘download’ in the phillip k dick or holy guardian angel sense, but not untill there was so goddamn much of it, that it breaks your head on the way in.

I’ve also noticed that the best received stuff on this site is the stuff that I’ve taken the time to fully think through and make sense to myself, rather than the disjointed babbling that sometimes comes out.

But anyway, the point is I’m doing a lot of that heavy lifting behind the scenes right now, and hashing out the shape of things to come. I’ve got a great backlog of ideas to implement, but I need to improve my hardware situation to get back into the 21st century, and get clear about what the hell I’m trying to say and who I’m saying it to. I realise a lot of the time I’ve been talking to myself, and while there’s a time a place for that, it may be time to set it aside for awhile.

Besides all that, I’ve formed a resolution to quick fucking around and finally get this arahat thing done. I’ve got about ten years of formal buddist practice in, and like much else here, it goes in fits and starts and I’ve gotten to the point where I know exactly what to do and how to do it, so everything else has to take a back seat for a bit. I’ve resolved to finish the path within 30 days. I’m on day 3 of that now, and I’m just digging deep into samatha jhanna practice for 10 or 12 hours a day to tighten up my concentration and make the subsequent insight manuevers easier.

At a certain point, gotama knew he had enough raw materials from studying with various teachers to finish the task he had set forth for himself, so he resolved to sit under the tree, and not get up until it was done. Like many things, it was about will.

Does anyone think you become enlightened without deciding to become enlightened? Not deciding to TRY. Fuck that. But deciding to DO IT.

“The training is nothing! The will is everything! The will to act.”

and so it is…

The Mosaic Effect 31: Common Sense is Not So Common

   Ahhh… here we are again. You almost forgot I did this stuff, didn’t you?

    But anyway. Some things on my mind, which touch upon our recent climate debate, politcs in general, and the pernicous nature of philosophical( or even worse, spiritual) relatavism.

   Plato and platonism, the buddha, existentialism, mob psychology, a bunch of labored breathing, some traffic noise, and a bit of politcal theory.

podcast page here

Direct download: ME31-common_sense_is_not_so_common.mp3

Magickal Record 04-07-07

Once more ’round the posts, I guess.

It’s been about a week since my fruition apparently dropped, and I do like to wait after these type of things to get a handle on what did or did not happen.

After my first profound mystical experience, I told a couple people that I was one with god, and said that I had touched a part of myself that would never die. That may or may not have been true, but you can see how saying things like that without a certain amount of deliberation can cause some difficulty.

Hence now, I sit, and I wait to see what the overall effect is going to be. Certainly my overall experience of suffering is radically diminished, if not entirely gone. That sense of being squeezed in a vice is gone, and my ability to deepen in concentration and calmness practice is greatly enhanced, to the point where it’s largely effortless to sit in access or 1st jhanna pretty much all the time.

Expect some more detailed review of this subject in the last augoiedes podcast. Suffice to say, I am ‘more’ enlightened’ than I was before, but that don’t necessarily amount to much.

Didn’t get as much done as I was hoping this week, as I had a bit of a relapse in my neck and back stiffness. It’s under control again, but simply a bit of a stern warning about too much useless time in front of machines like this. Makes me recall why I gave up writing for podcasting in the first place.

I’m priming myself for a week long water fast. Nothing mystical about it, simply a health thing. I can’t get too excited about only one a day a week, so maybe one week, twice a year will work better. I do suppose it will provide a bit of a kickstart to meditation but if so it’s a bonus and not really the end.

One thing I did do was clean my room. Or at least it’s in progress. The carpet is a different color now that it’s been vacuumed. I was living in a nest of my own discarded skin flakes and the mini ecology of microbial horrors that thrive on such things. Fuck that. My skin flakes have moved on to discover their own future evolution. God speed them to enlightenment.

Our newspaper advertising starts this Wednesday, so I expect to be rather busy, but I think I can put a few things together for the site. The Big Idea is still germinating, alas.

Updated goals:

-get back to concentrating in depth for at least an hour a day.

-lay plans for a week long water fast

-pay extra close attention to my posture and stretch diligently.

-head down to the clinic everyday to answer the phones as early in the day as possible.

-talk to D. about getting some kung fu going outside. weather warming up and all…

-get the fucking new mic already. if only to drop it from this goddamn list.

-finish up some new content for this site ASAP

Augoiedes Finale 2 of 3: Flowery Atomic Heart

   Rounding out my other discussions of concentration practice, we traverse such things as tantric iconography, nirvikalpa samadhi, how to not flame out like a rock star, and how to turn the thwarted idealisation of oneself into a working facsimile of the holy guardian angel.

 podcast page

Direct download: flowery_atomic_heart.mp3

We can build this muthafucka… we have the technology.

The Mosaic Effect 29: Together We Will Live Forever

By popular demand, we bring you an interpretation of “The Fountain”.

Reincarnation vs rebirth, the neurogenetic drama of humanity and the earth itself, true love vs dependency,  James Joyce and Finnegans Wake, concentration unto madness, and the immanent vs the transcendent.

podcast page

Direct download: TME29-Together_We_Will_Live_Forever.mp3

Tattoo some tree rings on your arms and get down for tai chi in space, kids.

Augoeides Week 7: If You Call, I Will Answer

This buisiness is like building ships in bottles sometimes.

 The opening you have to see what you’re doing is so small compared to the scope of the task, it’s very easy to overlook things.

   But anyway, here at the end of our regular material for the working, we discuss moving from episodes to lifestyles, and at long last I talk about that voice, and how I ( try to) live with it.

 podcast page

Direct download: AUG28-if_you_call_I_will_answer.mp3

apologies for the slightly listless tone of late. things is busy down here on the ground, and diverting energy into formal communique can feel a bit awkward at times.  big things in the pipe though, rest assured, and a flourish at the end, for the Augoeides.

Augoeides Week 6: Crossing The Threshold

 It’s not very often I’ve had occasion to pause, and perhaps tremble slightly, at some of the possibilities of my particular lifestyle. Some things you’d like to be ready for, but you’re almost certain you aren’t.

   So we talk a bit about one of those rare intervals, where a truly irrevocable change becomes possible. Things done here, never get undone.

podcast page

Direct download: AUG26-crossing_the_threshold.mp3